Burden of proof may refer to:

• Legal burden of proof
• Philosophic burden of proof
• Scientific burden of evidence

Other[link]

• The Burden of Proof, a 1990 novel by Scott Turow
• The Burden of Proof (film), a 1992 film based on the above novel
• "Burden of Proof" (CSI episode)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Scott Turow, January 2008

Scott F. Turow (born April 12, 1949) is an American author and a practicing lawyer. Turow has written eight fiction and two nonfiction books, which have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies. Movies have been based on several of his books.

Life and career[link]

Turow was born in Chicago, attended New Trier High School, and graduated from Amherst College in 1970, as a Brother of the Alpha Delta Phi Literary Society. He received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. In 1971, he married Annette Weisberg, a painter.

Scott Turow later became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, serving until 1975, when he entered Harvard Law School. In 1977, Turow wrote One L, a book about his first year at law school. After earning his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978, Turow became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, serving in that position until 1986. There he prosecuted several high-profile corruption cases, including the tax fraud case of state Attorney General William Scott. Turow also was lead counsel in Operation Greylord, the federal prosecution of Illinois judicial corruption cases.

After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, Turow became a novelist, writing legal thrillers such as The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won multiple literary awards, most notably the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers. Many of the characters appear in multiple books, and all of his novels take place in Kindle County. (The state is unspecified, but the county contains a tri-city conglomerate on the Mississippi between Chicago and New Orleans [Burden of Proof p. 52]; compare the "Quad Cities" on the Mississippi, originally Davenport IA, Rock Island IL, Moline IL, and East Moline IL, but now also including Bettendorf IA.) In 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time, which described him as "Bard of the Litigious Age".^[1] In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy (ECW Press, 1995). In the 1990s a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republished in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.

Turow is the president of the Authors Guild.^[2] He was also President from 1997 to 1998 and has served on its board.

From 1997 to 1998 Turow was a member of the U.S. Senate Nominations Commission for the Northern District of Illinois, which recommends federal judicial appointments.

Turow is a partner of the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Turow works pro bono in most of his cases, including a 1995 case where he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He was also appointed to the commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty by former Governor George Ryan and is currently a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board. He and his wife Annette divorced in late 2008 with three grown children.

Turow gave the commencement speech at the 2011 Rutgers-Camden Law School where he proceeded to lecture on criminal law including his personal views on the death penalty and the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

In 2011, Turow met with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig to discuss political reform including a possible Second Constitution of the United States; according to one source, Turow saw risks with having such a convention, but believed that it may be the "only alternative" given how campaign money has undermined the one-man-one-vote principle of democracy.^[3]

Controversy[link]

On March 9th 2012, Mr. Turow released a letter on the Author’s Guild regarding his sentiments on the insider publishing scandal and ensuing anti-trust lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department against Apple iBooks and five other publishing houses. Apple’s former chief executive, Steve Jobs and the publishing companies allegedly colluded to fix electronic book prices with an agency model in which Apple would collect 30% of the profit.^[4] Apple iBooks stipulated that publishers wouldn’t let rival publishers sell the book at a lower price. Turow’s letter generated controversy on numerous writer’s reviews and blogs across the internet, earning him the nickname "Turncoat Turow"^[5] when he stated that collusion might have been a “necessary” and “rational” decision made by the Apple. He blamed Amazon for the crisis, stating, ^[6]

“We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing. We do know that collusion wasn’t necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple’s offer…Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open.”^[7]

In his letter, Mr. Turow also warned the DOJ that the lawsuit might have adverse effects. “Our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.”^[8] His comments come at a time when the publishing industry has begun to default in favor of increasing self-published books, e-subscriptions and electronic readers.^[9]

Books[link]

Fiction[link]

• Presumed Innocent, 1987
• The Burden of Proof, 1990
• Pleading Guilty, 1993
• The Laws of Our Fathers, 1996
• Guilty As Charged, 1996 (as editor)
• Personal Injuries, 1999
• Reversible Errors, 2002
• Ordinary Heroes, 2005
• Limitations, 2006
• The Best American Mystery Stories, 2006 (as editor)
• Innocent, 2010 ISBN 978-0-446-56242-3

Non-fiction[link]

• One L, 1977
• Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty, 2003

Films[link]

• Presumed Innocent, 1990
• The Burden of Proof, 1992
• Reversible Errors, 2004

See also[link]

Novels portal

• List of bestselling novels in the United States

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Scott Turow at the Internet Movie Database
• A reading from The Laws of Our Fathers by Scott Turow
• Interview on Ordinary Heroes at the Pritzker Military Library